this book, in which a cynical system of morality was made attractive by ingenious paradoxes. ... His doctrine that prosperity was increased by expenditure rather than by saving fell in with many current economic fallacies not yet extinct. Assuming with the ascetics that human desires were essentially evil and therefore produced 'private vices' and assuming with the common view that wealth was a 'public benefit', he easily showed that all civilization implied the development of vicious propensities. Analysis As a satire, the poem and commentary point out the hypocrisy of men who promulgate ideas about virtue while their private acts are vices. The degree to which Mandeville's "rigoristic" definitions of virtue and vice followed those of English society as a whole has been debated by scholars. Kaye suggests that two related concepts of vice are at play in Mandeville's formulation. Christianity taught that a virtuous act was unselfish, and the philosophy of Deism suggested that the use of reason was virtuous because it would naturally reveal theological truth. Mandeville looked for acts of public virtue and could not find them, yet observed that some actions (which must then be vices) led to beneficial outcomes in society, such as a prosperous state. This was Mandeville's paradox, as embedded in the book's subtitle: "Private Vices, Publick Benefits". Mandeville was interested in human nature, and his conclusions about it were extreme and scandalous to 18th-century Europeans. He saw humans and animals as fundamentally the same: in a state of nature, both behave according to their passions or basic desires. Man was different, though, in that he could learn to see himself through others' eyes, and thus modify his behaviour if there were a social reward for doing so. In this light Mandeville wrote of the method by which the selfish instincts of "savage man" had been subdued by the political organization of society. It was in the interest of those who had selfish motives, he argued, to preach virtuous behavior to others: To critics it appeared that Mandeville was promoting vice, but this was not his intention. He said that he wanted to "pull off the disguises of artful men" and expose "the hidden strings" that guided human behaviour. Nevertheless he was seen as a "modern defender of licentiousness", and talk of "private vices" and "public benefits" was common among the educated public in England. As literature Less attention has been paid to